Friday, May 11, 2012

In Which the London Bookies Prove ThemselvesSmarter than JP Morgan Chase

If you get to be too big of a player in the market, then one day you wake up and find you are the market, and you will get killed trading against yourself. Jamie Dimon's crew may have missed this insight. Evidently the London bookies are more sophisticated:

A surge in bets has forced Britain's biggest bookmakers William Hill Plc and Ladbrokes Plc to suspend betting on the odds of Greece dropping out [of the Euro--ed.].... William Hill said the level of betting on Greece quitting first was such that it had become too risky to continue taking bets ...

"We've had Greece as hot favourites for some time but increasingly it was becoming the only one that people wanted to bet on," said a spokesman for William Hill, Britain's largest betting firm."It wasn't a healthy situation for bookmakers. We found it was virtually impossible to make a book."